CAPE, CAIRO, CECIL, COAL, COPPER: THE RAILROAD THAT DEFINED ZAMBIA

Jan 11, 2023

Kafue Railway Bridge (Pic courtesy of mapio.net)

Every day, millions of people criss-cross Zambia’s level crossings staggered north to south along The Line of Rail from Livingstone to Chililabombwe quite oblivious of its colonial legacy and how we got here in the scheme of things of imperialist Cecil John Rhodes Cape-To-Cairo dream.

You cross the line between Livingstone and Zimba, at Batoka, Choma, Mazabuka, and Kafue and enjoy a panoramic view as you drive and walk over it in Lusaka on Independence Avenue, Church Road and Great East Road Bridges.

It is hard to dodge the railway line at its Zambian home base in Kabwe; the staccato produced by the wheels racing over the level crossing is a motorist ritual as you enter or leave the Broken Hill town.

The unmistakable rat-a-tat again greets us at Kapiri Mposhi.

Then in no particular order, we drive under it and over it in both Ndola and Kitwe before bidding it farewell on the final approach to Chililabombwe as it heads to the Zambia/DR Congo frontier.

The railway line is the oldest symbol of imperial conquest to the early days of British Central Africa.

It is said, the Maxim Gun, Quinine and Steam Boat were the key ingredients of colonialism in Africa.

But the railway was the artery and spinal cord of colonial expansion and now stands as an interactive monument to our past, present and future.

The railway line was not only a fundamental piece in Cecil John Rhodes’ Cape-To-Cairo pet project but also his legacy to Britain's imperial conquest of South/Central Africa.

However, the railway lines’ birth in Cape Town and its thrust into the heart of darkest Africa was not started by Rhodes.

Rhodes was actually born a year after its genesis and almost seventeen years before the spark of South Africa’s first phase of its mineral revolution that lured him to these shores as a sickly 18-year-old boy from England seeking the therapeutic power of good African weather.

The soon-to-be imperialist later became one of the most controversial figures of Pax Britannica.

But, back to the foundations of Rhodes' Cape-to-Cairo dream.

The rudiments were laid in 1854*1 by The Cape Town Dock and Railways Company which began life with a capital of UK £ 600,000 and was headed by G. Latham Browne as managing director while W.Scott Tucker was consulting Engineer.

This Cape Province railway project came nine years after the first registered company failed to take off.

That setback, saw Cape Town beaten in the Train Race by its rival city on South Africa’s Indian Ocean coast.

Durban claimed the title on June 26, 1860, when it delivered South Africa’s first railway line that had a length of 3 kilometres.

Cape Town also lost the race because of prolonged arguments over where in The Mother City they would build the main terminus despite the city’s groundbreaking ceremony taking place on March 31, 1859.

The Cape line finally became operational on February 13, 1862.

Construction made its way to the Western Cape Wine Lands Region where it reached Stellenbosch in May 1862 en route to its final destination Wellington seven months later on November 4.

Then, the discovery of Diamonds in Kimberley in 1867 saw the railway line extended to the Northern Cape region.

And as fate would have it, its expansion also saw Rhodes and his brother Herbert leave their Cotton farm in Durban in 1871 to join the rush for fortunes on the Karoo.

When the railway line finally reached Kimberley on November 28, 1885, Rhodes had already amassed his fortune and elected to Cape Town Legislature in 1881.

Rhodes formed the legendary De Beers Mining Company in 1887 and later the British South Africa Company in 1889.

Rhodes later served as Prime Minister of The Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896.

It was an interesting twist of fate in that Rhodes' arrival in Africa, the discovery of Diamonds that marked South Africa’s first mineral revolution, and the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 that legitimised Africa’s partition by the European powers, synchronised to collide at the same crossroad.

Armed with wealth, political influence and deep imperial ambitions, Rhodes now had the impetus to expand British control into Bechuanaland (now Botswana) and beyond the Limpopo in what was also an ensuring mini scramble of Africa between the Cape English and the Boers of Transvaal who were both jostling for territorial influence north of the river.

And so it from Vryburg, up the line from Kimberley, where Rhodes' Cape To Cairo Railway dream actually started *2.

The plan was for the line to go through Bechuanaland and then east into Mashonaland to the Southern Rhodesia pioneer capital at Salisbury (now Harare) and then push north to the small British outpost on the southern shore of Lake Tanganyika in Northern Rhodesia.

That route would have been a huge feat of engineering had it gone ahead due to the challenging geographical features of rivers, valleys and escapements that lie in between.

But that plan fell through after the British Government declined to finance one end of the project from the East African side that would connect Rhodes project presumably passing through German's sphere of influence, Tanganyika, to join the East African line that London built from Mombasa to Uganda *3 between August 1896 and December 1901.

One thing to note is that the direct and obvious route through Beit Bridge, on the northern bank of the Limpopo River in Southern Rhodesia, could not be connected because to do so would have been to cut through the hostile Boer territory of Transvaal.

However, Rhodes through his company the British South African Company still did business with the Boer Republic at the height of the second phase of the mineral revolution and built the line to Bloemfontein, Germiston and then to the newly discovered gold mines of Witwatersrand that was completed in 1892 where South Africa's second and final mineral revolution was gathering pace.

Meanwhile, the Rhodesia/Zimbabwe-South Africa connection was only completed in 1974 when a junction line was constructed from Rutenga to Beit Bridge when Ian Smith's UDI government was locked out of both the Beira and Maputo railway corridors by Mozambique*4.

The embargo was Mozambique’s gambit as part of independent black Africa’s economic and political sanctions against Smiths’ Rhodesia.

But returning to Rhodes' dream project, the first stop of the railway was Mafikeng near the Botswana border in October 1894.

It can easily be said that the genesis of the Rhodesia Railways (the father of the Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia Railways) started from Mafikeng which was the staging point of the railway line heading into Britain’s colonies north of the Limpopo that the BSAC had been awarded to administer through a Royal charter by London.

And despite the earlier snub from Britain over the East Africa interconnection, Rhodes pushed on with the railway construction through Bechuanaland and this time the route went straight up north into Matabeleland to Bulawayo where it arrived on October 19, 1897, to become the first line built and operating in Southern Rhodesia.

This time, though, Rhodes 'railway line relentlessly followed the wealth like a shark smells blood in the ocean.

Its arrival in Bulawayo came three years after German prospector Alfred Giese *5 had discovered huge deposits of Coal just North-West of Bulawayo of present-day Hwange (formerly Wankie) in 1894.

But critically, the railway line's arrival in Bulawayo would end the most challenging logistical problems faced by the colonialists travelling from South Africa and up into the interior.

Before the railway lines arrived in Bulawayo, it took four months for Oxen-powered wagons to reach the city from South Africa with their payload.

Furthermore, Coal would now ease Rhodes' railways' energy solutions with the abundant supply at a source sitting halfway through his push for colonial conquest.

The railway line then left Bulawayo in June 1899 and now chased the Coal disposits and reached Hwange in December 1903.

It was a huge feat for that matter because work had briefly stopped on the Bulawayo-Wankie section amid the Second Anglo-Boer War from 1899-1902.

Materials for its construction could not come straight via the southern route via Bechuanaland but instead made the long detour via Beira where another line had been connected with Bulawayo and Salisbury (Harare).

The Salisbury-Bulawayo project was also headed by Rhodes' trusted and legendary engineer George Pauling.

Pauling had simultaneously built the Beira route with construction starting in 1892 and it reached Umtali (Now Mutare) in February 1898 to open Southern Rhodesia's second international railway gateway.

Salisbury was connected on May 22, 1899, and the builders reached the capital of Matabeleland on October 6, 1902.

During the Second Boer War, the only traffic that went south during that period was for the war effort and it would prove a vital support logistical supply route for that matter.

Meanwhile, Hwange would be the first of two mineral objectives the railway line would have met with the next stop being Broken Hill in Zambia where Lead and Zinc had just been discovered in 1902 by TG Davey *6.

It is important to note that it wasn’t Lead and Zinc that brought Davey to prospect in the Kabwe area but Copper.

There was a modest deposit of Copper just North West well away from the railways' route at Kafue Hook owned by his boss and legendary mining magnet Edmund Davis who ran five Copper mines in that region prominent being Sable Antelope.

It is critical to note here that Davis’ Rhodesia Copper Mines owned the Kafue Hook Mines which had great logistical problems getting their Copper to the nearest railway head, especially after their oxen-powered carriers were hit by Tsetse Fly infection.

The solution was the giant steel-wheeled tractors that towed multiple trucks of Copper and a couple of the last relics of these mechanical monsters lie at Clayton Park in Kabwe and Copperbelt Museum in Ndola.

Meanwhile, the BSAC, though, would settle on Broken Hill for now with an eye on bigger things on the Copper-rich Zambezi/Congo watershed.

However, Rhodes would not live to see the railway line even reach Victoria Falls *7 and died on March 26, 1902.

But Rhodes left a well-run machine led by die-hard lieutenants particularly Pauling who had come to Africa with a huge reputation armed with a resume of major railway projects in Russia and South America.

With Broken Hill on the BSAC minds, construction pushed on further north heading to Victoria Falls and as it progressed, it generated some revenue from tourists heading to the majestic waterfalls.

The tourists would drop off at where the line construction had reached and carry on by horse or mule to Victoria Falls.

Victoria Falls was finally reached on April 24, 1904, and it would become the turning point of life as we know it north of the Zambezi River.

Its arrival at the Zambezi Gorge would culminate in the construction of the iconic Victoria Falls Bridge.

The survey and preliminary bridge design were done by Ralph Freeman who would later gain World fame with his biggest project of all when he undertook another engineering icon, the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia.

Details of Freemans Victory Falls Bridge design were overseen by G.A Hobson who would later go on to supervise other major railway bridge works on the project north of the Zambezi River.

But the Victoria Falls Bridge and railway line construction had its challenges.

Firstly, the initial journey between the two construction camps on either side was a 16 Kilometer round trip.

A cable car was later run across the Zambezi gorge to carry the bridge and railways construction material and crew.

But it took some ingenuity for the canyon to finally be conquered.

The first attempt to fly the cables across using kites turned fruitless as the wind had a mind of its own.

A more technical solution was found by firing the wires across the Zambezi using rockets and a safety net was later spread just below to catch falling workmen in case of an eventuality.

Furthermore, the engineers had to cut the railway line just below ground level through the terrain than earlier planned because the upper walls of the gorge were not solid rock but boulders.

The engineers only found the firm rock to anchor the foundation of the bridge on in the lower walls of the Zambezi Gorge.

And while bridge construction progressed, project manager Pauling and his team pressed forward with the railway line on the other side of the Zambezi.

Its arrival on the northern bank of the Zambezi also signalled the decline of Old Drift and the local citizens relocated to the railway siding that would become present-day Livingstone.

Old Drift was the first British colonial settlement that was located on the banks of the Zambezi just above Victoria Falls and was the entry and pick-up port for supplies and human movement coming in and out of the colony.

Railway sidings would also mark the first colonial urban settlements in Northern Rhodesia ....however, that chapter of Zambia’s story will be illustrated later.

Meanwhile, the two sections of the Victoria Falls Bridge were connected within 18 months after work began and officially completed on September 12, 1905.

A provisional light railway line and walkway were also laid as the final peripheral works of riveting the last pieces of the superstructure continued.

However, a train had already reached Kalomo five months before the bridge was completed in May 1905 that was shipped in sections across the Zambezi Gorge using cables and later reassembled on the north bank.

Interestingly, the completion of the bridge came 50 years after explorer David Livingstone first visited Victoria Falls on November 16, 1855.

Meanwhile, bridge designer GA Hobson had now turned his eye to the next big bridge project up on the Kafue River that was built by A.L Lawley who was earlier part of the Beira/Umtali/Salisbury railway project.

The Kafue Bridges' steel structure was fabricated in England, then shipped to Cape Town from where it was loaded on the train, and later taken on-site to the Kafue River by Oxen-driven carriages from the point where the railway line construction had reached.

It was then reassembled on site where all 13 spans were placed on the piers in eight days, averaging three spans per day.

The majestic Kafue Railway Bridge was completed in 1905 after six months of construction and enjoyed a reign as the longest bridge in Africa.

But for Pauling and Lawley, this project was a more challenging job than the Victoria Falls Bridge because of the width of the Kafue River that cut across a narrow plain and the river was notoriously prone to flooding and bursting its banks.

Meanwhile, the railway line then reached a historic moment at the turn of 1906 when it arrived at what would become the future city of Lusaka.

And on January 11, 1906, the railway line finally arrived at its objective to tap into the Lead and Zinc riches of Broken Hill and what would become Zambia’s oldest mine.

The moment the railway arrived in Kabwe is reportedly immortalized in one of the earliest known Pathe News films ever made that details track being laid simultaneously as the steam engine rolled into town.

Meanwhile, the mine owner, the Broken Hill Development Company, later held a huge ceremony on June 20, 1906, to mark the first haulage of export Lead and Zinc from the mine.

John R. Day (1963, p 95) describes a hilarious incident where the railway builders, who were heading back to their camp at Kafue Bridge after the ceremony, caused a scene *8.

The workers got so drunk after feasting on the food and drink in their carriage back after the festivities that when they got back to their base at the Kafue Bridge, there was mayhem when the rowdy bunch pushed a railway wagon up and down the bridge.

It had to take Pauling to sober up the spectacle and a semblance of maturity returned.

Not too long after the dust had settled and the booze had dried up, it was back to work to the hard job of surveying the route from Broken Hill to the Copper-rich Congo/Zambezi watershed that was straddled by Katanga on the Belgium side and the future Copperbelt Province on the south side.

Up to this point, the railway had been built by the Mashonaland Railways Company which was financially struggling to break even with just the Broken Hill Mine payload to bank on.

To break even, one had to tap into the Copperbelt /Katanga Copper complex and the symbiosis of that strategy was undisputed.

The Copper mines desperately needed Coal to power the vast mining complex that was scattered across that region.

And the Coal the mines needed was in abundant supply on the south bank of the Zambezi at Wankie.

However, construction of the Broken Hill-Katanga sector was not financed from South Africa but from the Congo side headed by another Rhodes lieutenant Robert Williams.

Pauling’s engineering firm too had an interest in the contractor called The Rhodesia-Katanga Junction Railway and Mineral Company.

Williams, like Pauling, was a Cape-To-Cairo Railway cadre, and he was earlier the lead man in the BSAC’s Copper exploration work on the Copperbelt that began in 1890 and also Rhodes' head negotiator sent to meet King Leopold of Belgium for similar Copper mining concessions in Katanga.

Work on the Broken Hill-Katanga sector later began two years after the railway had reached Kabwe.

The Rhodesia-Katanga Junction Railway and Mineral Company construction team reached Bwana Mkubwa in 1909 before completion that same year when the line was connected to the Congo section on December 11.

The completion was quite timely because, four years later in 1914, the First World War would erupt.

History it seems was on the railways' side.

But it is worth noting that this feat of engineering was completed in the first 30 years of African colonial expansion in what historians Oliver and Atmore term as The Years of Exploration*9, a period before the First World War when there was very little infrastructure development in the newly acquired colonies.

Critically, a firm foundation was set for the next 30 years of Active Development that came at the end of WW1 in 1918.

The thin strip of the Line of Rail as we know it today would go on to shape elements we take for granted pre and post-independent Zambia.

It would define our politics, with all our first three seats of government namely Kalomo, Livingstone and Lusaka being credited to the railroad.

The railway line was also the reference point of Zambia’s economic colonial development and still is to date.

Culturally and socially too the reference is undeniable and a subtle example of this is football's long dominance on The Line of Rail.

Furthermore, an innocuous symbol of colonial expansion would also go on to dictate the country’s road and telecommunication development.

While the railway has lost its crown to road haulage, it nostalgically remains a symbol of national pride.

An emotive tone for its revival forever resonates especially in the pre and post-independence generations who used it as their primary mode for long-distance travel before the automobile became king.

Furthermore, the romantic ambiguity with this potent symbol of colonialism is as inescapable as the use of English prose in which this tale is told.

Not even the opening up of the east in 1976 via TAZARA has that phenomenon been able to be usurped.

REFERENCES

*1, *2, *7 , *8 Day. J (1963), Railways of Southern Africa, Arthur Barker Limited, London

*3 Elkins. C, (2005), Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, Pimlico, London

*4 Carter. G.M, O'Meara. P, (1982, Second Edition), Southern Africa The Continuing Crisis, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, USA

*5,6*Gann.L.N, (1964) A History of Northern Rhodesia Early Days to 1953

*9 Oliver. R, Atmore. A, (1978, Second Edition), Africa Since 1800, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom

ered north to south along The Line of Rail from Livingstone to Chililabombwe quite oblivious of its colonial legacy and how we got here in the scheme of things of imperialist Cecil John Rhodes Cape-To-Cairo dream.